The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites

life.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine, for a minute, traveling to a foreign country and exploring that nation’s culture. How might you hope to really understand the people—their traditions, their customs, and the flavors of their cuisine? You might visit museums, walk down city streets, or browse country markets. You would definitely eat the food there, because that is one of the best and often most surprising ways to learn about a different place.

The past is another country as well. It has flavors of its own that are well worth exploring. Experiencing those tastes reveals a time when the people and places of our own country were radically different than they are today. Like time travelers, we can see what life was like for our predecessors by conjuring up the techniques, textures, smells, and tastes of America from two hundred, three hundred, and even four hundred years ago.

The remarkable changes in ingredients, recipes, and menus over the centuries provide a window for us to appreciate just how different life has been during the various eras of America’s story. Exploring our food heritage can also heighten our sense of the differences and similarities between then and now. For example, beaver tail is likely too gamy and fatty for our modern palates, but hungry fur trappers in the colonial period dined on it happily. Conversely, warm pumpkin pudding with heavy cream still appeals to us today, just as it enticed new colonists in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. So while this book is primarily about the evolution of America’s national cuisine and foodways—a term that includes growing, harvesting, preserving, preparing, cooking, and eating food—history provides the context for understanding the intersection of culture and cuisine.

The American Plate provides a multilayered overview of the peopling of our country, our evolving foodways, and the transformation of our palates from 1400 to today. American Indians, Anglo-American women, enslaved (and free) African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants, western and eastern European arrivals, Hispanic families, and many more have contributed the flavors of their cultures to help create the variety of international and local influences we find in modern-day American restaurants, grocery stores, and kitchen tables.

To understand how America’s diverse, edible heritage developed, it’s worth exploring the people and events that shaped our cuisine and left indelible marks on the foods we savor today. Where did the raw ingredients for what we think of as American food originate? Were all foods local and seasonal before the introduction of modern transportation and preservation technologies? Who cooked the food, and whose culture predominated in the kitchen? These are just a few of the many questions we’ll explore in these pages.

This book serves as a guide to introduce you to both an America of long ago and a more recent and familiar one, through more than one hundred different foods (or bites) organized by ten eras of our national history. Drawing from a variety of sources, the book aims to shed light on the myriad cultures, values, and traditions that make up the United States through stories about our food (some very short, some longer). Peppered throughout are anecdotes, images, and recipes for all sorts of American dishes—from roast beaver tail and succotash to mint juleps, shoo fly pie, and firehouse chili.

Each chapter and each bite stands alone, so you may read this book from front to back or just start with a time period or specific food that interests you. I chose certain foods because they and their history provide a particularly clear lens through which to view our broader national history. Others exemplify or are symbolic of a specific event, such as a version of a WPA soup recipe from the Great Depression. My hope is that these narratives and recipes will inspire readers to explore America’s diverse culinary heritage, whether by recreating the unfamiliar tastes of the past or simply enjoying the stories I’ve included here.

Throughout America’s history, nature, economics, technology, and immigration have played important roles in our adaptation of indigenous foods, development of new ones, and adoption of others from different continents. Ultimately, by learning about the origins of our richly diverse culinary heritage and exploring the history of the foodways included in this book, we can develop a deeper understanding of our evolving cultural tastes and desires.

chapter 1

THE THREE SISTERS AND SO MUCH MORE

American Indian Foods before Columbus

Zesty tomato sauce from Italy. Baked Irish potatoes, hot and comforting. Robust Indian curry with red pepper spiciness. You may think of them as originating in foreign countries, but these traditional dishes are actually all based on flavors from the New World, foods that traveled eastward from North America across the Atlantic in the hulls of Spanish ships more than five hundred years ago. They would revolutionize the way people ate around the world.

Less culturally defining, or perhaps just more routine, are the lowly beans and squashes that regularly appear on plates and in bowls around the world. These New World foods also changed diets, extending life expectancy and increasing population growth all over the globe, and while they may not have the zing of some of their more flavorful counterparts, they’re equally important. And don’t forget American corn, or maize, with its central role in much of American Indian culture. It is one of the most important food crops today.

The Americas have a remarkable variety of indigenous foods, and many foreign cuisines wouldn’t look the same without them. South America gave us the potato in its various sizes and colors, which shaped the eating habits of northern Europeans—with devastating effect in nineteenth-century Ireland where the population had become too reliant on this one crop for sustenance. It’s hard to imagine Italian cooking without tomatoes, which originated in Mesoamerica (Central America) thousands of years ago, but there was a time when the future of pastas looked decidedly pale.

In the 1500s, Spanish conquistadors introduced tomatoes to Europeans, who eyed them skeptically. For one thing, tomatoes did not flourish in the damp, cool weather of northern Europe and Britain. Plus, their luscious appearance clearly labeled them as aphrodisiacs, while their leaves, so similar to their cousin, the deadly nightshade, linked them to poison. Fear trumped appetite, sexual or otherwise, so it is hardly surprising that the soft red fruit took a while to catch on. When it finally became clear that daring epicures did not die from eating what some people styled as love apples, tomatoes flourished in the sunny kitchen gardens of southern Europe. Interestingly, both tomatoes and potatoes would travel back to the North American Atlantic Seaboard almost two hundred years later practically as novelties.

Other American Indian foods flourished in what today is the United States. These are the crops that many tribes grew, harvested, prepared, and bartered. The Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—and other food supplies made up the provisions that the American Indians generously shared with newly arrived British settlers along the Atlantic coast. The initial survival of the earliest colonies in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Jamestown, Virginia, largely depended on the hospitality of the indigenous people with their food and cooking.

While you are reading the first ten bites, it’s important to remember that throughout North America, the First Nations had different cultures, cosmologies, and eating habits. Some were farmers, some were hunters, and some a mixture of both. Women in many regions gathered nuts, roots, berries, and wild greens such as watercress and fiddleheads, the curling tops of native ferns, in the early spring. In some tribes, women had also tended fields for generations, while others did not practice agriculture.

Note: In this chapter, I mention specific tribes or locations in an attempt to stay accurate, as broad generalizations are often unhelpful and inaccurate when describing American Indians before and after European contact.

BITE 1

Maize

(Zea mays)

People started farming in the Americas more than thirteen thousand years ago. In Mexico, archaeologists have found evidence of the cultivation of maize—what most Americans today call corn—since 7000 BC when ancient people domesticated and hybridized a wild grass called teosinte, the genetic ancestor of this versatile grain. Dispersed by wind, rain, and farmers sharing seeds hand to hand, the maize seeds traveled in all directions.

Over the centuries, native farmers selectively bred their crop to have larger cobs and bigger kernels, making the corn easier to harvest and process into food. As the cultivation of maize spread northward, different tribes developed various techniques and traditions for turning the hard seeds into nourishment. Maize became so central to tribal culture that its planting, sprouting, and harvest played important roles in religious observances and calendar reckoning.¹

More than four thousand years ago, ancestors of the Hopi Indians were among the first indigenous people in the American Southwest to cultivate maize in what are now Arizona and New Mexico. It took about two to three thousand years more for maize farming to spread to the native tribes of New England, although some archaeologists believe that the cultivation of maize and other plants—including sunflowers and tobacco—happened independently on the East Coast.

Maize grew happily in semicleared fields without special plowing, which made it easy to cultivate. In many tribes, women tended the cornfields with their Stone Age tools, planting beans and squash around the low mounds where the maize grew. These three food crops—maize, beans, and squash—became known as the Three Sisters. The tendrils of the bean plant climbed up the cornstalk, supporting both the bean and corn plants, while the large flat leaves of the squash plants discouraged weeds. Today, anthropologists call this milpa agriculture, milpa being the ancient Nahuatl (Aztec) term for field.

The Hopi Indians in the American Southwest, called the People of the Blue Corn, still grow a gorgeous, indigo-colored maize. You can buy it online to make authentically historical tortillas.²

Compared to some of the world’s other domesticated grains, maize was an enormously productive crop that didn’t require intensive labor. Wheat, for example, demanded more time and effort from the European peasant. Corn grew in poor or rich soils and happily shared space with other local crops as well as beans and squash. Once harvested and dried, the cobs or kernels could last all winter in covered pits or mounds. This was not the sweet, juicy yellow corn we buy today. The kernels were hard and variously colored—like the decorative Indian corn that stores sell now in the fall, only the cobs were smaller. Different kernel colors and cob sizes were identified with different localities.

Maize is a high-calorie carbohydrate and was an excellent food for the native people, who worked hard physically throughout the year. When the hard kernels were soaked overnight in an alkaline solution (such as water mixed with wood ashes), the heart of the seed was exposed and people could more easily absorb the nutritional value.

Corn is incomplete nutritionally, but when eaten with beans, it forms a complete protein. Adding bright orange squash to the meal contributes valuable vitamins. Thus, traditionally, the Three Sisters combined well not only in the field, but also in the bowl, making sturdy, nutritious dishes.

By the way, the word corn comes from an English term that refers to a region’s local grain, which could be wheat, oats, or barley in England. The settlers called maize corn, recognizing it as the common grain of the American Indians. Today—for better or for worse—corn and corn products are abundantly represented in our national diet and the global diet of many people as well.

NIXTAMALIZATION

About 3,500 years ago, native people in Mesoamerica developed a process called nixtamalization that improved the food value of maize. The word derives from an Aztec Nahuatl term for this treatment. They soaked the hardshelled corn in water mixed with wood ashes or lime overnight. The softened hulls floated to the top of the water or were easily slipped off by hand.

Sweet, green corn, like we enjoy on the cob today, did not receive this treatment. But nixtamalizing the tough, dried kernels made their food value, including niacin, become much more accessible to the human gut. The Algonquin word for the resulting white, soft heart of the corn is rockahominie, from which our word hominy is derived. Once the outer hulls were removed from the maize, women could pound the hominy with a mortar and pestle or grind it on a stone by hand to make cornmeal.

Later, European settlers would skip this step in corn preparation because their millstones were powerful enough to turn corn into meal without soaking it. Unfortunately, that meant that their systems did not absorb all the nutrients from the maize. Thus, lacking nixtamalization as a culinary tradition, settlers with highly corn-dependent diets sometimes ended up with severe niacin deficiencies that caused diseases like pellagra.

Pellagra, which causes symptoms ranging from canker sores to memory loss, continued to be a scourge in poor farming areas in the South until the 1950s. American Indian and Mexican groups continued to soak their maize in the alkaline water, however, avoiding these problems.³

BITE 2

Beans

(Phaseolus vulgaris)

Like corn, beans have played an ancient, vital part in the traditional diet of American Indians, today and more than five hundred years ago. Most kidney-shaped beans—such as navy, scarlet runners, kidney, pinto, black, and lima—originated in the New World. Some details missing from the historical record can be more easily traced through word origins, and it’s fun to see and hear the linguistic links with the past on our menus. For example, pronounce lima with a Spanish accent, leema, and you’ll recognize that the lima bean was named after Lima, the capital of Peru, its homeland. The French word for green bean, haricot, comes from the Aztec ayecotl.⁴

As a little girl, I thought that pinto beans were eaten by pinto ponies, which had captured my imagination on TV. Pinto simply means spotted in Spanish, and both the beans and the ponies have similar spots.

We often forget the humble bean’s role as a change agent in the human story. Providing a cheap, reliable form of protein, it extended life expectancy among the Americas’ First Nations and still provides vital nourishment to people all over the world. Following the cultivation of maize, the bean appeared as one of the Three Sisters in the common village plot set aside for farming. The black bean and the multicolored pinto bean are close relatives to the beans grown by pre-Columbian American Indians. Today, pinto and black beans abound in robust Mexican and vegetarian dishes.

Like maize, beans were dried and lasted well into the spring. They thickened the daily stews or soups, absorbing the smoky flavors of venison, buffalo, or salmon jerky and infusing the food with those deliciously complex tastes. Combined with corn, beans form a complete protein even in a meatless supper, which was crucial for indigenous tribes in the Americas when their game or fish supplies ran low due to heavy snows or other conditions.

Also, American Indians had essentially no dairy or domesticated poultry until the arrival of Europeans. Cheese, milk, and chicken eggs played no role as protein sources until the 1500s, when the Spanish conquered the American Southwest and introduced varieties of cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens. Thus, the combination of beans and maize in various dishes, like the traditional succotash recipe below, was of key nutritional importance.

TRADITIONAL SUCCOTASH

INGREDIENTS

• ½ cup water

• 1 (10-ounce) package frozen baby lima beans, defrosted

• 1 (10-ounce) package frozen corn, defrosted

• 4 to 5 smoked duck slices

• ¼ cup roasted sunflower seeds

• 1 pinch cayenne pepper

• Salt to taste

DIRECTIONS

Bring the water to a boil in a large saucepan with a cover. Add the beans and corn to the pot, and reduce to simmer. Cover and cook, 4 to 6 minutes. Drain. Meanwhile, dice and cook the smoked duck slices over low heat until crisp and all fat is rendered. Add the sunflower seeds, smoked duck crisps, and seasonings to the beans and corn. Combine well and serve.

Serves 6 to 8 as a side dish.

If smoked duck is unavailable or too pricey, substitute 4 slices hickory-smoked bacon. I like to add 2 tablespoons olive oil, but it is more authentic to add duck or bacon fat before serving.

BITE 3

Squash

(Cucurbita pepo L., C. moschata, and other varieties)

The third and final of the Three Sisters, squash has always grown in a variety of shapes, colors, and sizes ranging from small pumpkins and acorn squash to thin, green zucchini types. There are two basic kinds of squash, summer and winter. Summer squash—like yellow squash and zucchini—have an edible, soft skin and soft seeds, and will last when ripe for two weeks in a cool, dry place. Winter squash—such as butternut, acorn, and spaghetti squash and pumpkin—have a hard rind and seeds with shells, and can be stored for months.

Although many of our squashes, like our beans, have been hybridized for taste, appearance, and shelf life, the traditional acorn squash is a good approximation of the plant grown by American Indians more than a thousand years ago among the cornstalks and the climbing runners of the beans. The drying process after harvest intensified the natural sugars of the thinly sliced orange squashes and pumpkins. This sweetness brightened the flavors of winter stews.⁵ Native women cleaned and dried the seeds of the pumpkin and other squashes, sometimes grinding them into flour. Local nuts—pecans, hickory, butternuts, black walnuts, and acorns, depending on the region—were also shelled and stored for winter, often by women and girls working together while they chatted and sang songs. The seeds and nuts brought texture, protein, and vitamins to the American Indians’ diets. Stewed pumpkin, sweetened with dried berries and maple syrup, created a dish close to what modern Americans would call dessert.

It may be delicious, but don’t confuse stewed pumpkin with pumpkin pie. The ingredients for a wheat-flour pie crust, the hen’s eggs, the cane sugar, and most of the spices required to make a pumpkin pie would not be available on the North American continent until after the arrival of the colonists.

Once the women removed the soft insides and seeds from winter squash, the hollowed shells served as temporary eating bowls or containers. American Indians often ate one-pot meals, and both winter and summer squashes might be included in those big mixtures. The scooped-out shells of some squash varieties made pretty dishes to hold the stews, and cleanup was a breeze. Today, many kinds of squash are rising in popularity again, as people embrace everything from acorn squash and pumpkin to spaghetti squash as a healthier substitute for its pasta namesake.

BITE 4

Venison

All this focus on corn, beans, and squash might indicate that American Indians ate a largely vegetarian diet. Far from it. Meat and fish of all kinds occupied a central role and took on spiritual aspects as well. The tribes who lived near the great natural cathedrals of early American forests developed efficient ways to hunt deer, a mammal that preferred cleared areas or the woods’ edge to the forest itself. Native hunters drove herds of deer into rivers, where the animals could be easily snared by other members of the hunters’ clan waiting for the prey. The men lit controlled fires driving deer into funnels created by high piles of brush and logs where small herds could be killed en masse. More typically, hunters expertly killed deer with weapons such as bow and arrows or spears.⁶

Venison functioned as a primary source of protein in the diet of many American Indian tribes, but the deer itself provided much more than just meat. Woodland Indians, such as many of the Algonquin tribes, used deer hide (with the hair) for winter clothing and as blankets. Expertly tanned or roughly scraped, the hide would become so central to American Indians’ commerce with white settlers that a dollar’s value became known as a buck, or the price of a male deer hide. (Imagine what a million bucks worth of something back then would have looked like—that’s a lot of deer hides!)

No part of the deer went unused. The skin itself, made soft and pliable by women’s energetic pounding and scraping, could be used as a canvas for artwork or pictoglyphs, for housing, and for clothing. Tendons and muscles were stretched to provide webbing for snow shoes, traverse equipment, and papoose scaffolds. Antlers, bones, and teeth became weapons, tools, and ornaments. None of the carcass went to waste.

Although they were plentiful, deer were a challenge to kill with the Stone Age weapons at hand. Often hunters had to track a wounded deer for miles. If a hunting foray proved particularly successful, lucky and skillful men might return home with several dead deer or send others to fetch the carcasses where they were killed. After a communal feast, where everyone enjoyed the bountiful meat, women would set to work preserving the rest of the venison for the future.

WHAT DOES STONE AGE REALLY MEAN?

The term Stone Age does not necessarily indicate a time period. It refers to people who do not use or make iron or other metals outside of ornaments. In the early twentieth century, for example, some indigenous people in New Guinea and Brazil used Stone Age tools and weapons. Typically, Iron Age or Steel Age cultures ultimately overpower Stone Age cultures because their tools and weapons are stronger and often more effective. A war club is powerful until matched against a cannon. In the period between 1500 and 1700, Europeans armed with complex, metal tools and weapons conquered the First Nations in the New World. At the same time, European germs and plagues would prove to be equally devastating weapons of conquest against these indigenous, sometimes highly sophisticated cultures.⁷

Hunger frequently haunted the tribes in the late winter, when provisions set aside in the abundance of autumn began to run low and no food could be found on the plains or in the woods around them (depending on where they lived). Sometimes warring or rival tribes would destroy each other’s food supplies to try to wipe out their opponents, or sometimes the winter would be unusually harsh and long—this was, after all, the Little Ice Age. Some Algonquin tribes referred to February as the Hunger Moon.

Tribes preferred fatty meat over the lean meats recommended today for modern diets. Bear fat, incidentally, turns rancid rapidly, but once rendered it was valued as a strongly flavored cooking grease, a healing lubricant for wounds, and a cosmetic preparation for skin and hair. Rendered venison fat served as an important and desirable ingredient in many Woodland Indian meals.

Most native people preserved meat during the hunting season by hanging it in strips above a slow fire to create jerky. (Our word jerky comes from the Peruvian Quechua ch’arki, meaning smoked or burned meat.) Any meat could be preserved this way, including bear, duck, turkey, buffalo, and rabbit. Women would remove the fat and melt it slowly, rendering it separately to extend its freshness.

BITE 5

American Bison

(Bison bison—also known as the American Buffalo)

Deer weren’t the only four-legged creatures that American Indian tribes feasted on in early days. Vast herds of bison inhabited most of today’s central continental United States, stretching from the western slopes of the Appalachian chain to the Rocky Mountains, in forests and on the prairies. Smaller herds existed along the East Coast but died out soon after the Europeans’ arrival.

A bison bull is a huge mammal, weighing in at about a ton, while the bison cow averages seven hundred pounds, dainty by comparison to her mate. The Plains Indians, a category that includes six language groups and many tribal nations—Oglala and Lakota Sioux, Crow, Blackfoot, Comanche, and others—identify themselves as people of the bison, because their life, culture, and ultimately, their destiny were inextricably tied to these great, shaggy beasts.

A classic image of American Indians hunting bison shows them riding expertly on horseback while shooting arrows at the herd. But there were no horses in the Americas until the arrival of the Spanish in 1492. So, before that, for more than two thousand years, men hunted buffalo on foot, sometimes chasing herds over cliffs for a mass slaughter.

This technique of herding bison to their death proved extremely effective, and a clan could feast for days on the choicest cuts of the bison, such as the tongue and liver.⁸

In what is modern-day Montana, there are more than three hundred buffalo jump archaeological sites, including one, now the First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, where eighteen feet of ancient buffalo remains lie at the foot of the cliff.

So many millions of bison roamed the Great Plains that it was unfathomable that they would ever near extinction. Once the American Indians captured wild horses, descendants of the animals imported by the Spanish in the 1500s, they became among the most accomplished riders in history. Hunting on horseback increased their chances of bringing home large game for their families. Still, they barely made a dent in the bison population. It would take bovine disease from domestic cattle, the railroad, and a stated federal policy of buffalo slaughter designed to force starving Indians onto reservations to bring these shaggy giants to the edge of oblivion in the 1890s.⁹

Like deer, a slaughtered bison served multiple purposes for the Plains Indians, providing food, clothing, shelter, weapons, ornaments, and tools. A buffalo robe or blanket kept its owner warm on the coldest winter nights. Women smoked dried strips of buffalo meat and rendered the fat to store for the lean winter months. Bison meat was a key staple in the life of the Great Plains Indians until the 1890s.

Bison meat is very nutritious compared to that of domestic animals. It ranks higher in iron and vitamin B-12 than beef, pork, or chicken, and ranks lower in fat, calories, and cholesterol. The fat is stored separately on the back of the bison and does not marble the meat. A plain, well-done bison burger can be very dry, at least to modern tastes, so don’t overcook it.

PEMMICAN

Pemmican is a densely nutritious, portable food with an ancient history. It is the American Indian version of an energy bar. Pemmican traditionally includes some kind of meat and animal fat. So you can also make this from dried venison, duck, moose, or turkey, and it will still be authentic.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 pound natural (unflavored) buffalo jerky, finely minced

• 1 cup dried blueberries

• ½ cup toasted hickory nuts, pecans, or sunflower seeds, finely chopped

• 2 to 3 tablespoons warm buffalo fat

DIRECTIONS

Mix the buffalo jerky, blueberries, and nuts together thoroughly. Using a pastry cutter or two knives, slowly cut in 1 tablespoon of soft fat at a time, stirring after each addition. Test the mixture after each addition, and stop adding fat once the mixture stays together in a clump. Spread mixture in a rectangular pan, 11 by 7 inches. Slice into bars when cool. Place in individually decorated rabbit-skin pouches, or wrap in waxed paper. Store in a cool, dry place. Take along on hunting trips or anytime you are going on long journeys on foot.

Makes 1 dozen bars.

Substituting venison fat for the buffalo fat would also be authentic, or try using beef suet instead. Pemmican is good for you if your life requires that you burn enormous amounts of calories. Otherwise, the fat is detrimental to your health.

BITE 6

Blueberries

The humble blueberry is experiencing a big revival these days, thanks to publicity about its antioxidant qualities and low carbohydrate value. But for many people—including me—blueberries have always been in style. They grow all over North America except in arid regions, so it’s easy to take advantage of them. I spend my summer vacations near the Garden River First Nation Reserve on St. Mary’s River in Ontario, and the First Nation people there sell baskets filled with tiny blueberries, intensely sweet and flavorful. Enjoying a breakfast of wild blueberry pancakes and local maple syrup while sitting outside on our front porch defines summer for me.

Raspberries, huckleberries, and blackberries, all of which still grow wild in the continental United States, join blueberries as some of the most delicious and popular indigenous small fruits of North America. They played an important role in taste and nutrition, particularly among the Woodland Indians of the